I read a book a while back called "the disappearing spoon" where it discussed how earlier semiconductors used gallium, but were failure prone due to the heat (gallium has a very low melting temperature). Silicon was a godsend and once that was used, it changed semiconductors forever.

My first thought after reading the summary was "oh no! Not this again!" But the "nitrade" may make a huge difference. Hopefully this is the case.

I used marklogic when I worked at a previous job and after learning how it worked and understanding it better, it made our jobs incredibly easy. It just had a serious learning curve.

Marklogic is a nosql db, that uses XML for its object format and xquery for its query language. This thing is NOT mongodb. It actually works really well and allows for complex data modeling with the ability to do joins and have transactional isolation in making changes to the data as well as a really solid content processing framework with pipelining and all that jazz.

Now, I can't imagine a reason for using marklogic, or any non-relational db for a project like this. The only clue is that marklogic has a lot of government contracts; mostly for the military. So maybe that's why it was used. But the fact that they chose a database system that they weren't experts in for a project that had so much visibility speaks volumes on how mismanaged this whole project was.

When I was in 4th grade, we had those Atari workstations where we'd pop in a cartridge and do typing tutors. We also learned Logo, which at the time, I didn't equate with programming. In 6th grade, I had a class where we'd write BASIC on PCjrs and that's where I became totally enamored with the fact that I could have the computer do what I wanted. Even though the extent of the class was just drawing graphics to the screen, we learned a little about `for` loops and I was able to do some basic colour-cycling animations. Years later, I moved on to QBasic, then x-basic (which became REALBasic), then C, perl, and other more modern languages.

I wish there was something as simple as BASIC, but as accessible as HTML/Javascript for today's generation. I think C would make a better first language, but being able to build things with graphics is far more engaging than just commandline apps that need to be compiled. Something with low-levelish access (like BASIC's peek and poke, etc) and access to files, but also able to be publicly displayed would be a huge win.

the thing with node is that it can handle things that your server can't necessarily handle. Things like websockets and server sent events. If you were to build a site that needed websockets for real-time feeds using traditional technologies (like php + apache), you'd wind up with apache having n open connections with n instances of your application loaded into memory. The power of node.js is the fact that a single instance of the app will stream content to an arbitrary number of clients with a single instance. It does this through the reactor pattern (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reactor_pattern) and an event loop; the same mechanism that nginx uses to outperform apache (newer versions of apache have been adding support for this, I believe).

It's funny because people seem to have a lot of hate for node (myself included), yet don't have the same level of hate for similar technologies like python's Twisted or Ruby's EventMachine. Personally, I'm a bigger fan of Erlang/Elixir for this type of thing as it scales a lot better and takes better advantage of hardware. An 8-CPU system doesn't require 8 instances of node to take full advantage of the hardware.

I think for day-to-day use, the touchscreen is pointless, but I have found myself wishing for touchscreen on a couple of occasions.

When I was demoing something to a coworker a couple months back, I was pointing to the screen and since I was used to using my phone to tap things, for a split second, my instinct was to touch the screen to click a button. At that moment, I thought to myself "this wouldnt' be the worst feature as long as it wasn't a requirement for interaction."

I couldn't see myself using it and I consider it more of a novelty, but besides a slight bump in total price of the device, what's the disadvantage of having the touchscreen available? If somehow, there was smudge-proof glass, would it be that much of a burden? I mean, my screen is already smudged because the occasional beard hair sticks to it from the keyboard when I close it, and I have to wipe it away, or because I pointed at something an inadvertently touched the screen.

Posted
by
Soulskillon Tuesday April 09, 2013 @03:05PM
from the show-what-our-priorities-are-at-least dept.

An anonymous reader writes "Electronic Arts has successfully defended its title as the 'Worst Company In America.' Consumerist finished its annual tournament for bad companies, pitting notorious companies against each other in a single-elimination bracket where readers vote on which is worse. EA won last year, and today Consumerist announced the results of this year's final vote. EA was voted worse than Bank of America by 78% of participants. 'A made a royal mess of the SimCity release by failing to foresee that the people who would buy the game — and who would, per the game's design, be required to connect to the EA servers — might actually want to play at some point in the week after making their purchase. But that's just the latest in EA's long history of annoying its customer base with bad support.' Of course, EA saw this coming, and its CEO pre-emptively responded last Friday. Of course, many of his explanations and promises rang hollow for gamers who are sick of the company's practices: 'Until EA stops sucking the blood out of games in order to make uninspiring sequels, or at least until they begin caring about how much gamers hate their lack of respect for our money and intelligence, this is going to continue. We don't hate them because we're homophobes, we hate them because they destroy companies we love. We hate them because they release poor games. We hate them because they claim our hate doesn't matter as long as we give them our money.'"

So, it appears that this is outlawing attaching a camera to your kite, to a model rocket, to an arrow... many forms of amateur photography are basically becoming misdemeanor offenses. so if one decides to start their iphone recording and throw it up into the air to see what they can see, or throw their recording ipad like a frisbee in the park, if either captures images of a place or person who didn't give express permission to photograph, you could be charged.

That's the most realistic description of the modern definition of credit. When it comes to credit cards, you're pressured into using them to cover things that you should have been able to afford to begin with, enticing you with low monthly payments. The problem is that you get a couple things that you *need* for a while, then you get one or two things that you want and next thing you know you're stuck with no way out.

10 years ago, it was easy to get a new card with a low interest rate (typically 0% for a year) on balance transfers, so if you planned it properly and you got into a hole, you could consolidate to a 0% card and be able to pay off a significant portion (if not all) within that time period. Obviously this is assuming semi-responsible spending habits with the occasional lapse in judgement, not the spend thrifts that will blow their entire wad on clothing, a flatscreen TV and an home theatre system the day they get the card.

Today, those 0% cards are pretty much non-existent. The only way out of the hole once you're in is to either get help with it (many people don't have a friend or relative willing to loan that kind of money), go to a debt consolidation agency (also a racket, but if you can get a good deal can actually work) or completely change your way of life (move closer to work, sell your car for a more fuel efficient one, move to a state with cheaper gas, move to a cheaper household, etc), but that isn't necessarily an option for many people either.

If I decided to do this, I would need to operate my LAN like every node was bare on the internet. I've got fileservers with guest access (for, you know... houseguests), web services, my invoicing system, and a whole slew of other personal services. The thought of open wifi on the LAN kinda scares me from a security perspective.

Given that the majority of people out there aren't security conscious, there are all kinds of implications for keeping default router settings/passwords.

When I was staying in the Oakwoods in Burbank, CA for work (long-term housing, like... for months), I could see every machine on the LAN and all of the windows machines had read-only filesharing on, so I was able to loot up on all kinds of raunchy porn that people downloaded from limewire. One guy even had a bunch of tax documents in a shared folder. This included a PDF of the lease on his lexus, and some credit card statements. Another guy had 8GB of photos of his kids and family.

When it comes to the Creative Suite (especially Photoshop and Illustrator), Adobe has been really good about actually giving you value for your money. Sure they break compatibility, but that's because they give you new features that you actually use all the time. The bad thing about these features is that techniques that retouchers used to charge $100/hour for and work on a photo for 14 hours now takes someone who has zero experience 20 minutes to accomplish, so it's ruining the industry... but at the same time, the quality of work and amount of work you can accomplish in a given amount of time has increased dramatically.

Many of these features are older. I haven't used the suite extensively since CS3 when I was a certified expert in photoshop and illustrator. I'd been using photoshop since version 2.5 and illustrator since version 7, so I've seen the evolution of the products and they are incredibly impressive. I'm constantly amazed at what they've been able to do with these programs.

Things like Office are a different story. I'm not aware of any specific features that they've added in any recent versions. MS changes their file formats with every new version of their package and doesn't seem to be adding any additional features beyond user interface (which is no excuse for breaking compatibility).

From what I see, though, one of the big issues is that when you get to be the size of Facebook or Twitter, it HAS to be about making money. Who is going to pay for your servers and who is going to pay your employees who work on the site full-time? Once you hit critical mass, in order not collapse under your own weight, you need to protect your monetary interests and that means closing off access to competing services.

Now, in the past, this wasn't as much of an issue because people actually paid for things and/or the advertisements covered costs. Today, the bottom has fallen out of the advertising market and no one wants to pay for anything anymore. I have friends that think Flickr's $25/year pro account is a rip-off. I think that's a *steal*.

The ecosystem of the web today is full of freeloaders and "entrepreneurs" who are trying to make a quick buck (via VC or getting bought, primarily) rather than trying to build awesome new products that people would actually want to pay for. No one wants to build companies anymore, they just want to build windfalls.

I've spent the better part of the last year trying to bring this back. Not to use as a primary time-telling device, but as a way of easily synchronizing across timezones, mostly for IRC/IM and teleconference meetings.

I also think we need to completely kill daylight savings (as many people are suggesting). It is definitely time to do that worldwide.

A very large problem with this forcing of real names is when the sites in question have blacklists for certain names. I have a friend who's real, birth certificate name is "Aragorn" (his parents are HUGE LOTR geeks) and facebook does not allow that name, so he goes by Aragor. It's incredibly annoying to me, but he doesn't really care that much. facebook wants him to send a copy of his driver's license as proof so they'll allow him to use the name.

I'm just glad that they let me use Spike. I mean, it may not be on my birth certificate, but it's the only name I use. It's on my bank accounts (BofA doesn't seem to care), credit cards, cell phone, work ID, everything. My parents have called me that since before I was born and it's all anyone calls me.